Archive for October 1st, 2013

As promised in Cites & Insights 13:10 (October 2013), since there have been no sales for either book in all of 2013, The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009 and But Still They Blog have now been deleted. These books are no longer available.

The issue is 36 pages long. The “online version,” designed for reading online or on a tablet or large-screen ereader, is 69 pages long.

This issue includes:

The Front: Erehwon Community Library: A $4 to $1 Example pp. 1-4

An example of what a library could derive from $4 to $1: Public Library Benefits and Budgets, using a mythical “median library” that’s the average of the two public libraries with precisely median service population. (This essay is very similar to a September 27, 2013 post at Walt at Random, except that the post misspells the library name.)

Words: The Ebook Marketplace pp. 4-30

It’s been a while since I’ve looked at a range of ebook-related issues. This roundup covers up to four years–and it’s really Part 1 (of at least two and maybe three or four parts). It includes items related to ebook devices, competition, collusion, DRM, stupidity, ebooks going beyond narrative text, “what’s a book?” and miscellany. (Part 2 will include sales, pricing, software, history and future–and probably lots more.)

The Back pp. 30-36

Sixteen mostly-snarky little essays on a range of topics–including one that’s really not snarky: What if a stereo magazine had three successive reviews of three different speaker systems, found all of them excellent–and the three were priced (per pair) at $106,800, $29,800 and $159.99 respectively? (Yes, that’s a decimal point in the third price.) Oh, and what if the second and third were designed by the same designer–who added his signature to the nameplate of the $159.99 version?

Reverting to form

For the last few issues, announcements didn’t link directly to the PDF(s). Instead, announcements linked to the C&I home page, which now has the “Pay What You Wish” section just above the current issue table of contents and links.

I was hoping this speed bump–adding one click to the process of getting to the issue–would encourage a few more people to contribute.

I think it worked. A little bit. For a while. But it’s now one day shy of three months since there’s been a donation. So, at least for now, I’m reverting to the direct links.

Of course, I’d still very much appreciate donations. Of course, donations would still encourage me to keep going with C&I. Oh, and it’s still the case that donating $50 or more will get you a PDF version of Your Library Is… if you want it.

*All Cites & Insights PDF ebooks are explicitly site-licensed for
mounting on a library's server and providing to authenticated users. That
includes The Gold OA Landscape 2011-2014, A Library Is..., Beyond the
Damage and any others.